Darkwing wrote:Shinji... Well like some people said he really isn't passionate about music. Actually there isn't really anything Shinji is passionate about.
I always took that "Well, it's just that someone else sugested it..." as one of his typical half-answers. Whenever someone, typically Kaji or Misato asks him wether he likes something or wants to do something, even in cases where it's obvious that he does like it, they get something like "Uh, I don't dislike it", "I'm not sure", or "Oh well, it's just because someone else said it."
The first examples I can think of is the post-graveyard conversation in 2.0, and the answer to Kaji's question wether he likes Misato, but I'm sure I could dig up sufficient examples from the classic series as well.
The biggest example is the entire EVA piloting thing - He sticks around in Tokyo-3 because he wants his old man to notice him, because he wants to keep that semblance of a social circle he established there, and maybe even to protect them, but it takes him 12 episodes to explicitly state the "I want daddy's respect" part and 19 episodes for "I don't want anything to happen to them" and the whole damn show for "I wanna see them again because I wanna be with them." .
And here, too, the first thing he said was "Well, you all say I should do it, right?"
There is that statement from the CR that Anno apparently thinks of Shinji as the type who absolutely will not budge if he
really doesn't want to do something -
He's just reluctant to just be his true self, and not always honest with himself. To some degree it's that if he makes a definite statement, he will be judged based on it, there will be opinions about it, and depending of what he's talking about, responsibility.
He chose to charge Shamshel. People are going to ask why. He's afraid of their reactions to the reason why. So he dodges the issue....
The whole music bit is just another example - at that point, Asuka and him have been living in the same house for months, and she only finds out in episode 15, because she
came home earlier than planned. Which implies that he made sure to practice when his flatmates were out of the house... in contrast, his ep26-AU-counterpart has it openly lying around in his room where visitors (like AU!Asuka) can see it.
EoTV seems to use the whole music hobby as a bit of a symbol for his "identity", with it being something of his own that he had before he came to Tokyo-3 (In that way, it's similar to Rei's books) and when we see him playing in episode 15, he does briefly close his eyes like he's immersed/enjoying it...
As a general rule, I'd say that it's not really like he's genuinely dispassionate ansdsimply doesn't have much interest in/ big emotion for the stuff and the people around him - he probably has exactly the opposite problem, he's a very emotional person liable to do short-sighted, irrational things, but he's also repressed as hell/feels like he shouldn't express these feelings (Probably because he always felt he was unwanted and thus had no right to bother others with his feelings - or the one time he threw a tantrum at Gendo who proceeded to never showed his face to him again cemented his own anger/emotions as something "very bad" in the back of his head. again, why do we call our dark sides "dark"? Because they're the parts we don't know well, because we don't want to look at them, because we decide not to accept them, that we shouldn't have them), and even if that weren't the case, he's never learned
how to express them since he was always alone.
That's quite a disadvantageous combination...
